Expulsion Quotes

“Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.

Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.”
― Geoffrey Miller

“The outermost reach of fascist radicalization was the Nazi murder of the Jews. No mere prose can do justice to the Holocaust, but the most convincing accounts have two qualities. For one, they take into account not only Hitler’s obsessive hatred of Jews but also the thousands of subordinates whose participation in the increasingly harsh actions against them that made the mechanism function. Without them, Hitler’s murderous fantasy would have remained only a fantasy.

The other quality is the recognition that the Holocaust developed step by step, from lesser acts to more heinous ones.
Most scholars accept today that the Nazi assault upon the Jews developed incrementally. It grew neither entirely out of the disorderly local violence of a popular pogrom, nor entirely from the imposition from above of a murderous state policy. Both impulses ratcheted each other up in an ascending spiral, in a way appropriate to a “dual state.” Local eruptions of vigilantism by party militants were encouraged by the language of Nazi leaders and the climate of toleration for violence they established. The Nazi state, in turn, kept channeling the undisciplined initiatives of party militants into official policies applied in an orderly fashion.

The first phase was segregation: marking the internal enemies, setting them apart from the nation, and suppressing their rights as citizens. . . .Segregation reached its climax with the marking of the Jewish population. First
in occupied Poland in late 1939 and then in the Reich in August 1941, all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David sewn to the chest of their external garments. By this time, the next phase—expulsion—had already begun.

The policy of expulsion germinated in the mixture of challenge and opportunity presented by the annexation of Austria in March 1938. This increased the number of Jews in the Reich, and, at the same time, gave the Nazis more freedom to deal harshly with them. The SS officer Adolf Eichmann worked out in Vienna the system whereby wealthy Jews, terrorized by Nazi thugs, would pay well for exit permits, generating funds that could be applied to the expulsion of the others.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“Sie gingen nach draußen, an den Kirschbäumen vorbei, über den Graben zu den Apfelbäumen, die Dirk zum Felde vor ein paar Jahren neu gepflanzt hatte, sie waren noch sehr klein, die Blüte hatte schon begonnen.
Jetzt waren sie vereist. Zweige, Blätter, Blüten sahen aus, als wären sie in Glas gegossen, Bäume wie Kronleuchter, sie blendeten im frühen Sonnenlicht, man ging durch einen Spiegelsaal. Sie gingen schweigend, hörten nichts als ihre Schritte auf dem vereisten Gras und über sich die Möwen. In dicken Tropfen fiel das Wasser von den Bäumen, weil das Eis jetzt in der Sonne schmolz.
„Man kriegt das nicht so oft zu sehen“, sagte Vera. Sie blieben stehen, die Hände in den Taschen, es war sehr schön.
„Alles hinüber“, sagte Anne.
Vera schüttelte den Kopf.
Sie nannten es Frostberegnung, die Bauern machten es in kalten Frühjahrsnächten, besprühten ihre Blüten mit feinen Wassertröpfchen, die im Nachtfrost dann zu einer dünnen Eisschicht wurden. Eismäntel für die Blüten. Frostschutz durch Vereisung.”
― Dörte Hansen, Altes Land

“Israeli Jewish society is incapable, for moral and political reasons, of murdering millions or hundreds of thousands of Arabs. It is also inconceivable that Palestine’s Arab inhabitants would abandon the country of their own free will. But a campaign of expulsion, as required to rid the country of all or most of its Arab population, would doubtless take weeks if not months to implement and would be halted in its tracks by the international community and by much of Israel’s Jewish public.

Similarly, the achievement of a Jew-less Land of Israel through murder or expulsion or a combination of the two by the Arabs would in all likelihood be stymied by the international community, or at least the United States, which might well intervene militarily.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict